My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.
I think the hardest part about anything you do for 18 months is just keeping yourself together for 18 months.
In 1994 I bought my first tour bus. I still own it and believe it or not it's still out on the road on my tour.
I dropped out of Reed College [Portland, Oregon] after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
I used to tour with this band. I was a drummer. I would tour a bunch for about 10 months out of the year and act for about two months. I would make what I needed from acting and would stretch it out.
I'm really just trying to hash out the next two weeks of my life. So, something that is potentially four months down the road is not just a mile down the road for me, it's a million miles down the road.
They claim that autism naturally occurs at about 18 months, when the MMR is routinely given, so the association is merely coincidental and not causal. But the onset of autism at 18 months is a recent development. Autism starting at 18 months rose very sharply in the mid-1980s, when the MMR vaccine came into wide use. A coincidence? Hardly!
Age is just a number. For 18 months at Boro I was the first one in at training and one of the last out. I look at people like Manuel Pellegrini and Marcelo Bielsa and think they all have something to offer.
We got off the Clash of the Titans tour and I said that my wife and I were working on having a baby and sure enough we found out that she was pregnant. So I told them nine months in advance that I wasn't going to tour in September so I could witness the birth of my first son.
It's been 18 months since I won on the European Tour and to win the flagship event, I could not have asked for any more.
Before I had kids I'd go out on the road for months and months at a time, but now I don't think I'd want to do that anymore, because I'd miss too much time at home, so it's just a matter of monitoring how much work that I do and how much time I'm on the road.
When I left Genesis, I just wanted to be out of the music business. I felt like I was just in the machinery. We knew what we were going to be doing in 18 months or two years ahead. I just did not enjoy that.
Even at the end of the road, read the first sentence, there is a road. Even at the end of the road, a new road stretches out, endless and open, a road that may lead anywhere. To him who will find it, there is always a road.
We just got a tour bus. I didn't know tour buses could be this nice. It's just me, Brian Haner the guitar guy, the tour manager and a writer. We laugh ourselves silly. Apparently we're going to have a road dog, a miniature pincher. It's the smallest they've ever seen. How masculine am I going to look, working with dolls and a miniature dog?
I do road gigs occasionally but I don't want to go out on the road for months at a time.
I managed to break through at the age of 18, and what a tour it was for the first few years.